Sunday 5 October - Mushroom Risotto

We've been eating quite a lot of vegetarian food recently - this risotto is one of Georges favourites, but I added a bit of meat garnish to make it a bit more interesting.

I use both dried and fresh mushrooms, and use the soaking water from the dried mushrooms in the stock. This time I had a mixture of fresh chestnut and oyster mushrooms, and some rather posh mixed dried mushrooms that I'd bought at the Winchester Farmers market.

I fried shallots, garlic and the dried mushrooms.

 

The risotto was then made in the usual way, adding the rice, then some white wine, and adding the stock a bit at a time.

 

I then added the fresh mushrooms which had been fried in butter, and some grated parmesan.

For the garnish, some black pudding was cubed and fried, and some raw cured ham slices were also fried until crisp

The garnish was used to top the risotto, along with some more grated parmesan.

To serve with this, I made some garlic bread out of a loaf of ciabatta that I'd made and forgotten to serve up